A.8 Conclusion

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It's interesting to look back over Vineyard.NET's first six years of operation. On the one hand, we accomplished practically everything we set out to do. We created a self-sufficient company with a fairly large customer base. We created Perl scripts for managing user accounts, generating reports, and even submitting credit card numbers securely over the Internet to our merchant bank for payment. We grew the company to more than a thousand customers. We cashed out. And then we bought it back.

On the other hand, a lot of the diversions that we investigated never panned out. For example, we have that great software for billing credit cards, but we have never been able to sell it to anybody else we couldn't even give it away. We spent many hours working on proposals for providing network service to schools and various businesses, only to be passed over for political reasons that had nothing to do with our technical capabilities. We deployed a cryptographic web server because our customers told us that we had to have one, and then nobody used it. All of that is pretty frustrating.

I learned a lot about Unix and computer security by running Vineyard.NET. The project added a good 200 pages to Practical Unix & Internet Security and was responsible for the creation of the book that you are reading now. On the other hand, running Vineyard.NET kept me from writing who knows how many other books.

As for the value of what we've created, I certainly would have made more money working for somebody other than myself. When Broadband2Wireless bought Vineyard.NET, my annual salary jumped from $30,000 to $140,000. When we bought Vineyard.NET back, my salary was suspended: Vineyard.NET simply could not afford to pay me.

The ultimate lesson that Vineyard.NET teaches is that it takes a lot more than the correct mix of technology to create a successful service. It takes the right people, the market, the customers, the market conditions, and a lot of luck.

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